Still, I was changed by what happened. There were other men with whom I had dates and longer term romances, and there were other occasions when I went all instead of just part of the way. But Walt’s ghost was always with me. That look of his. Those eyes. That lined, handsome face. I always found it hard to settle on someone else, to really believe that they might truly want to love me. And by the time the War had finally ended I was older, and, with my mother’s arthritis and my father’s stroke, I soon ended up having to cope with the demands of the tea-room almost single-handed. Time’s a funny thing. One moment you’re eighteen, lucky, lucky, lucky, and enlisting and leaving Manchester forever. The next you’re back there, your bones ache every morning, your face is red and puffy from the smoke and the heat of cooking and the people over the serving counter are calling you Mrs instead of Miss even though they probably know you aren’t—and never will get—married. Still, I made a success of the business, even if it ruined my back, seared my hands, veined and purpled my face. Kept it going until ten years ago, I did, and the advent down the street of a MacDonald’s. Now, my life’s my own, at least in the sense that it isn’t anybody else’s. And I keep active and make my way up the hill every week to collect my pension, although the climb seems to be getting steeper.
The dreams of the War still come, though, and thoughts about Walt Williams—in fact, they’re brighter than this present dull and dusty day. I sometimes think, for instance, that if everyone saw what Walt saw, if everyone knew what was truly happening in wars and suffered something like this visions, the world would become more a peaceable place and people would start to behave decently towards each other. But we have the telly now, don’t we? We can all see starving children and bits of bodies in the street. So perhaps you need to be someone special to begin with, to have special gifts for the tasks you’re given, and be in a strange and special time when you’re performing them. You have to be as lucky and unlucky as Walt Williams was.
And I can tell myself now, as I dared not quite tell myself then, that Walt’s life had become unbearable to him. Even though I treasure him for being the Walt who loved me for those few short hours, I know that he sought me out because of what I was.
Chop girl.
Death flower.
Witch.
And I sometimes wonder what it was that hit Walt’s Lancaster. Whether it really was some skyborne scrap of metal, or whether luck itself hadn’t finally becoming a cold wall, the iron hand of that dark bomber’s deity. And, in my darkest and brightest moments, when I can no longer tell if I’m feeling sad or desperately happy, I think of him walking across that foul puddle in the starlight as he came out of the NAFFI, and as I watched him in an old chapel after we’d made love, dancing across the choir above me on nothing but dust and sunlight. And I wonder if someone as lucky as Walt Williams could ever touch the ground without a parachute to save him, and if he isn’t still out there in the skies that he loved. Still falling.
Afterword
I decided I wanted to write about a so-called “Chop Girl” after coming across a brief mention of the term in a book about the bombing of Dresden. It seemed like a near-perfect expression of the kind of superstitions that people fall back on when their lives are under extreme stress in ways they have very little direct control of. That, and my own mother “typed for her country,” to use her phrase, in Lincolnshire during the war, although she was in the Army rather than the RAF. In fact, it was where she and my father met, and her best friend’s boyfriend, whom I came to know much later, was part of a bomber crew. It took a while, though, to turn all of this into a story, when Walt Williams finally presented himself to me as the Chop Girl’s exact opposite; the luckiest (but also, perhaps, unluckiest) man in the RAF.
THE PERFECT STRANGER
As I watched the flying boat alight in the bay, I thought, this is what heaven must be like. Along the quay, the other island guests were smiling, expectant, nervous, sharing, whispering their secret hopes; laughing, even, at the strangeness of it all. Above the stuccoed buildings of the little town, huge lips on a hoarding formed the word Welcome, a warm breath that carried on the breeze across blue water, was held shimmering in the arms of tropical hills.
The props of the flying boat slowed and her prow drifted to face the breeze. A passenger tug fanned across the water. Soon, reunited couples were walking back along the quay, hand in hand, arm in arm, but still—and understandably—uncertain of each other. I checked the note again in the pocket of my shorts. Meena. Was that an Indian name? Should I be looking for someone with black hair, dark skin...
Lin the tour guide came over. She was dressed in a gorgeous blue sarong, busy with her clipboard. “Still haven’t found your wife, Marius?”
I shrugged. “I wouldn’t know if I had.”
“Of course.” She smiled brightly. She took my arm and led me through the happy press of bodies along the quay.
“Marius, this is Meena,” she said.
A tall and elegant woman turned at the sound of her name. Tall, yes, I’d somehow imagined that. But there was no trace of my Indian lady. Meena had pale brown skin, marvellous green eyes...or was that just this tropical light? No, I decided. It was her, she was beautiful. I stared at Meena. Meena stared back at me. What else was there to do?
“It’s true, isn’t it?” Meena said, her face suddenly breaking from seriousness. Laughing. “What they say—I really can’t remember you.”
I stepped forward. “Anyway, Meena. I’m glad you’re here.”
She held out her hand. Unable to tell if she was being ironic, I took it in both of mine. Then she leaned forward and let me kiss her cheek. We stepped back and smiled again. On the hillside above the harbour, the lips on the hoarding smiled with us. They breathed the word Welcome.
“Do you know how long you’ve been here?” Meena asked as our jeep took us along the rough coast road to our bungalow. She seemed happy and relaxed, her right foot up on the rusty dashboard, her khaki dress pushed back to her thighs.
“Not long,” I said. I lifted my hands from the steering wheel and leaned across the gearstick. Meena let me kiss her, parting her lips, pressing with her tongue. The jeep slowed, then took control. It rumbled on between the brilliant sea, the white sand, the chattering jungle. Better than us, it knew the way.
When my hand strayed along her thigh, Meena caught it firmly.
“Let’s wait,” she said. “It’s sweeter to wait.”
So I sat watching Meena as she drifted across the pine and rugs of our bedroom, lifting dresses from her case. All the doors and windows were thrown wide. She was seemingly casual, absorbed. But sometimes, she would lean close to me, let her bare arm brush my cheek. Or she would stand and stretch at the window where white curtains billowed with the beat of the waves. I wondered if it could ever feel this way with a true stranger, whether this slow, delicious dance was some pattern we instinctively remembered from our life together. Are people ever this happy? I wondered. Could things have ever been this good?
“There’s one odd thing,” Meena said, closing the doors of the wardrobe, turning to face me. “The tour people don’t let you take anything with you, do they? But when the flying boat was over the ocean, I looked in my case and found this.”
It was in her hand. She held it out.
“A photograph of me. Now, Marius, isn’t that odd..?”
I found the evidence quite by accident one day when I was going through Meena’s drawers. We worked different hours. I generally saw my prospects mornings and evenings at their homes. The people Meena dealt with were mostly retired, available during what would once have been called office hours. But I liked having the middle of the day to myself, I liked the cold solitude of our flat, being able to get stuff done, being able to go through Meena’s things.
I was in a good mood that morning as the Volvo took me home through the ruins of the city. I had completed two sales, and another one looked likely. All three were for the Grade A security package, which cost the
most, tied the client to an open-ended maintenance agreement, and paid the highest commission. Sensing my mood, the Volvo played Dvorak’s American Quartet.
Through the automatic gates leading into our estate, the Volvo cruised past sooty Grecian pillars, weeping stucco. But for the perpetual absence of sunlight, it could have been an old Hollywood slum. The flats were higher on the hill, for people like us who couldn’t afford houses, closer to the ravaged sky. One of the Big Companies had recently put up an advertising hoarding on the roadside. Huge lips parted and smiled down at me. Overriding Dvorak on the Volvo’s speakers, they murmured close to my ear, a voice creamy with digitised sexuality. Escape, the voice purred, stretching along my spine like a cat. Treat yourself to the one luxury that money can’t buy. Well, maybe only just...
I picked way across the damp underground car park, unthinkingly ducking the concrete stalactites and shelves of glowing fungi. The lift was in a good mood. Hello, Marius, it said, and took me straight to our flat without demanding an extra credit.
The flat was cool, grey, empty, softly humming to itself, smelling faintly of toast. As she often did, Meena had left our bedroom window running, ticking up the cost of the rental. It showed a scene from an tropical island, nostalgic waves beating the shore with a sound like an old-fashioned record in the run-out groove. I rummaged under the duvet for the remote control, but the flat beat me to it. The window snowed, then cleared to transparency. I stood looking out, feeling the cool, faint breath of reality. We were fairly high here, up on the eighth floor. I could see bruised clouds ploughing over the of the estate, the lips mouthing silently on the hoarding, the grey tangle of the city beyond.
Meena could never understand why I liked daylight. Plain, muggy daylight. There was hardly enough of it to fill the room—but that was the point. It was faint, evanescent, dreamy. And anyway, what did she understand nowadays? I wandered over to her drawers. The top one was always a little stiff. You had to lift and then pull. Here, she kept her jumpers and cardigans. Woollens, as—anachronistically—she liked to call them. Here was a fairisle, still almost new. I held it up, remembering a rare, happy day, the three of us together. Little Robin in his bobble hat, laughing unsteadily as we swung him between us. Then I folded it back carefully, the way Meena had done.
The next drawer down was for her underwear. Everything was loose here, just stuffed in anyhow. In the cobweb shadows, my hands wandered through her things, feeling the poppers, the loose pull of elastic. I liked the specificness of underwear, the sense of secret purpose, that this fits here... These days, it was the only time I felt close to Meena. When I was alone. Unlike the Meena-of-now, the vision I touched was pliable, loving. The drawer smelled of salt and linen, white memories of freshly crumpled sheets. It reminded me of times when the words came easily, when they didn’t even matter.
I was about to close the drawer when a glimmer of light caught my eye. Down in the tertiary layers of bras she no longer wore, knickers that were starting to wear through. Light. Bright daylight. And a small voice. It came from a corner of the drawer.
My fingers tangled under an old sachet of lavender, then closed on a piece of card. I lifted it out. The light shone on my hands and face. A photograph. It spoke to me.
“—don’t—”
Meena, in some park.
“—don’t—”
Turning towards the camera.
“—don’t—”
A smile of surprise brightening her lips. Her hair a loose bun, strands of it clinging to her cheek. Blue sky. Dappled light from a whispering tree.
“—don’t—”
Meena, endlessly turning towards the lens.
“—don’t—”
I put the picture down. It went dark and silent for a moment, thinking that I’d gone away. But I had to pick it up, look at it again, hold it in my shaking hands.
“—don’t—”
Don’t. How could a negative word sound so loving?
Lin the tour guide came down to see us in her jeep that evening, to check that we were settled in. Meena and I were sitting out on the veranda. The air smelled leafy, salty, earthy, wet. An hour before, there had been rain, flapping the palms, chattering in the gutters. We had been lying tangled in the damp sheets of our bed, too happy to move. Just in time, as the first heavy drops fell, the sensors in the windows had banged them shut. The sound of the rain pressed down on us. Smelling the sweet sudden change in the air, my fingers had traced the streaming shadows across Meena’s skin.
“Hi!” Lin waved. She picked her way between the puddles and climbed the wooden veranda steps. “You like it here?”
We both smiled at the understatement. Out to sea, the sunset was under way. The clouds were fairy mountains.
Lin sat down, clipboard on her lap. Her bright blue sarong of the morning had been replaced with an equally brilliant red one. Despite the heat, she always managed to look clean and fresh. She asked us if we’d managed to work the bath and shower, found the food in the kitchen, explored the entertainment facilities. Of course, we had done none of these things, but we nodded and said everything was fine.
“Some people find the amnesia a problem.”
Meena said, “I still feel like myself, if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s exactly it.” Lin smiled. “Some people don’t”
Meena leaned forward in her rattan chair. In this twilight, against her white dress, her skin was incredibly brown. “We must have chosen to come here, right?”
Lin tapped her clipboard. It glowed briefly, but she didn’t glance down at it. “Meena, I don’t have your particular details. That’s deliberate, of course. Company policy. But I can tell you that it costs a great deal of money to come to this island. Not that everyone is a billionaire or anything. People win prizes, the Big Companies give out these holidays as performance incentives...you might just have saved.” She tapped the clipboard again. It threw shadows across her face. It was growing darker by the minute. “Whatever, make the most of it.”
“But why would anyone want to forget everything?” Meena asked. “To leave themselves behind?”
“All sorts of reasons. Just think, you might both have demanding jobs or some other worry. What better way to forget all that?”
Meena nodded, although she didn’t look entirely satisfied. Personally, I couldn’t see what the problem was, as long as we were happy.
Lin stood up, but she obviously hadn’t quite finished. “There are some specific advantages I can tell you about. The books, the music, the holo library, for example. You won’t remember any of that. So you have a whole world to re-discover, if that’s what you wish to do. There’s a guy comes here every year for two weeks. He re-reads the same book. It’s new for him every time.”
We watched Lin walk back towards her jeep, her red sarong aflame in the twilight.
We made love in our flat that night. Had sex, anyway. I turned over in bed to grab Meena, and Meena didn’t push me away. I was self-absorbed, uncaring of her reaction: the photograph gave me a passion that I hadn’t felt in years. Have you done this with him? I wondered, Your photographer friend? Or this? Meena was puzzled, although not uncooperative. But she insisted on keeping the bedroom window running. Moonlight. That bloody tropical shore. She used to say she liked the way it shone on our skin. Years before, I had found the habit arousing. Later on, I decided it was narcissistic. Now, I guessed that she simply wanted something interesting to watch while our love-making was going on.
I didn’t sleep well. I spent a lot of time gazing at Meena’s face on the pillow. The waves in the window frothed irritatingly on moonlit sand. I couldn’t find the remote control without turning on the light, and the flat itself got confused when Meena and I had conflicting views about something.
We used to make love anytime, all the time. Now, it had to be in bed, at night, with the window running, a silly ritual that still often ended in hundred different versions of Not Tonight Marius anyway. Before we were married, before
we had Robin, before work became more than just work and money didn’t matter, Meena always kept some piece of clothing on. One stocking, a necklace, a scarf. I remembered that she had a specially expensive scarf tucked down in one of those drawers, something I’d bought her one Christmas years ago, supposedly to wear in her hair, although we both knew what it was really for. It was night black, sprinkled with stars. It spread out and out, cool layers of darkness. I remembered kissing Meena through it. I remember feeling the salt sparkle of Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, the way she used to sigh from the back of her throat when she came.
People change, they drift apart. But how could we have lost so much? Don’t. That smile. So much. Without even knowing. But I took comfort from that photograph in her drawer. I knew now that it wasn’t just me, or even simply us.
After showering, changing, making love, we lit a fire from the white bones of driftwood we found on the beach. Looking up, the stars were everywhere. A crab-like robot scuttled out from beneath the veranda and across the white sand to see to our needs. It even offered to light the fire, but that would have spoiled the fun. Instead, we sent it running obediently into the phosphorescent waves.
Meena brushed sand from her feet and sat crosslegged, watching me. “Marius and Meena,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s strange, to have such odd names that match?”
“Everything about being here is strange,” I said.
“Tell me what you remember.”
I recited the names of the Big Companies, dates from history, venues for the Olympics. Meena chipped in, disagreeing over these little facts in the way that people always do. We both found that reassuring, to know that there was a real world out there, and that together we were part of it. It became a game. Capital cities, kings and queens... Beyond the firelight, the dark wall of the jungle wailed and chattered.
Nowhere: Volume II of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod Page 4
